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Muriel Villanueva

The narrator of this novel, a writer, arrives by train at Casetes Beach with her month-old daughter on her back. She prepares to spend a few weeks in one of the cottages by the sand. Her husband has recently passed away and she needs to open the parenthesis of her life: to forget something, and to discover something else. But the appearance of an overly assertive starfish precedes a series of disturbing events, and as the narrator begins to lose a hold on reality, we are immersed in the uncertain territory of allegory.

With a lively and direct style and overwhelming poetic force, Muriel Villanueva guides us through the daily motions of life, and at the same time a fantastic journey of a woman in search of her own maturity.

Open Letter

Catalan Literature Series

The Left Parenthesis

Megan Berkobien

María Cristina Hall

Víctor Català

Nonat Ventura, an orphan raised by nuns in Girona, Spain, embarks on a compulsive quest to uncover his origins, with the hope that he is destined for a higher social status. His search leads him from a successful apprenticeship, to factory work in Barcelona, and finally to a band of thieves that seeks to get rich by any means necessary. Nonat’s central story frames a series of stories, a kaleidoscopic effect within a One Thousand and One Nights narrative: fictional tropes of orphans, spinsters, maids seduced by masters, crooks, go-getting provincials combined with realist depictions of factory workers, haberdashers, street-porters, corrupt politicians, and Belle Époque high society.

Català relishes describing the male proletarian ambience of small factories and capturing the fraught atmosphere, carnival of disguises, and class tensions on the city’s streets, in its households, Liceu opera house, and theaters. A rebellious artistic project that was set to shock and discomfort readers and critics, Català contests the prevailing ideas on space, class, language, art, and gender.

A Film (3,000 Meters)

Peter Bush